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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

With regard to the excellent and revealing article by Farber et al,¹ we wish to make the following comments.

To the extent that physicians would justify their participation in executions on the basis that capital punishment has a deterrent effect on murder and thus protects life, they should know the current scientific "bottom line" regarding deterrence. There is now widespread agreement among criminologists that the death penalty is not a more effective deterrent to murder than an alternative sanction, namely, long-term imprisonment.²

In the study of Farber et al,¹ the number of physicians who believed that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on murder is striking: 46% believed that the death penalty significantly lowers or somewhat lowers the murder rate. The opposite effect of the death penalty has been called brutalization, the proposition that the murder rate goes up after executions. In one explanation of brutalization, individuals receive the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Physicians' Attitudes About Involvement in Lethal Injection for Capital Punishment
Neil Farber, Elizabeth B. Davis, Joan Weiner, Janine Jordan, E. Gil Boyer, and Peter A. Ubel
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(19):2912-2916.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT